Inside Cloud (Mar 1st, 2018)

Apple has come under criticism for moving iCloud accounts registered in China to state-run Chinese servers. Apple officially made the transition on Wednesday amid an uproar from privacy advocates and human rights groups. "The changes being made to iCloud are the latest indication that China's repressive legal environment is making it difficult for Apple to uphold its commitments to user privacy and security," Amnesty International warned in a statement. The criticism highlights the tradeoffs major international companies are making in order to do business in China, which is a huge market and vital manufacturing base for Apple. In the past, Chinese authorities would have to go through an international legal process and comply with United States laws on user rights. -CNN

$12.9 billion in cloud spend will be completely wasted this year. Gartner’s latest predictions show that $305 billion will be spent on public cloud this year. Just looking at instances left running when not being used -- a common problem in organizations as they rapidly adopt cloud services -- $13 billion of that spend will go right down the drain.

Spotify intends to use Google Cloud even more in the future, eventually moving remaining computing and storage workloads in its data centers to Google. The disclosure came in Spotify’s filing for a public share sale. Spotify previously used Amazon's cloud for its remote computing needs, but in 2016 it revealed a plan to migrate its backend to Google's public cloud. Google and Amazon both compete with Spotify in the music streaming business, but Spotify said in the filing that "we do not believe that Google will use the GCP operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our Service.” -CNBC

Google Cloud has signed a deal with Flex, a $9.5 billion gadget manufacturer, in a cloud computing deal. Flex will use Google Cloud technology to further build BrightInsight, a platform for connecting medical devices together. The eventual goal is to provide a standard way for medical devices to shunt data up to the internet for analysis. The deal gives Google Cloud another sizable customer under its belt, as it works to gain ground on the leading Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Plus, it deepens Google's presence in the healthcare cloud computing market. –BUSINESS INSIDER

Alibaba Cloud has launched a quantum computing service on its public cloud. The company said the quantum service runs on a processor with 11 qubits of power. Alibaba worked with the Chinese Academy of Sciences to build the system, touting it to be the second-most powerful cloud service available to the public behind Intel’s 20-qubit offering. Alibaba said customers would be able to access the superconducting quantum computing cloud service to run or trial custom-built quantum algorithms and download the results. This would enable them to assess the performance of quantum processors and identify any potential technological barriers. -ZDNET

The Department of Homeland Security intends to launch a cloud steering group as part of its cloud computing strategy. The move comes as the Department of Defense is fielding a high-level cloud steering group to come up with a plan for large-scale cloud adoption. Homeland Security’s group would include top ranking technology officials from throughout the department. While the agency has adopted cloud computing in some areas, the Trump administration has made leveraging cloud computing and more modern technology infrastructures a priority. –FEDERAL COMPUTER WEEK

Inside Cloud will publish a lighter scheduled next week. We will return to our daily schedule the week of March 12.

Spotify intends to use Google Cloud even more in the future, eventually moving remaining computing and storage workloads in its data centers to Google. The disclosure came in Spotify’s filing for a public share sale. Spotify previously used Amazon's cloud for its remote computing needs, but in 2016 it revealed a plan to migrate its backend to Google's public cloud. Google and Amazon both compete with Spotify in the music streaming business, but Spotify said in the filing that "we do not believe that Google will use the GCP operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our Service.” -CNBC